Um, Jennifer? Is Dirty Twice

“We're tighter than ever. We're louder than ever, we're pissed off, we're freaked out. We're like a dog in a little aluminum jacket.”

So says Fig Regan of the self-described trans-slut-rock duo Um, Jennifer? nearly a year after the release of their debut LP, Um Comma Jennifer Question Mark. Even beneath the humor, the sentiment is still a fitting snapshot for where the group is now—shaking with the kind of anticipation that often precedes combustion. 

When I got to talk with Fig and Eli Scarpati (Um, Jennifer? 's second half) one late-January afternoon, it made immediate sense why the pair aligned so efficiently and urgently in their continued creative work. Eli is an eloquent speaker; he can finagle a word like “bolstering” into a sentence so casually that it feels as reflexive as “like” or “um.” Fig’s sentiments, however, are often shrouded in comic abstraction, skit-sentences that could be analyzed for academia if you sat with them for long enough. This communicative polarity sits at the forefront of their first full-length offering from 2025; an ungovernable collection of tracks that bridges the gap between strident noise-punk and bubblegum indie-pop. Despite how airtight Um Comma Jennifer may be, it was just the genesis of a particular style of contrariety that the duo is finding more confident curiosity in: accessible vs. experimental, clean vs. dirty. 

The first time I saw Um, Jennifer? perform, there were maybe 30 people in the room, a majority of whom seemed to be friends of the band. What that audience may have lacked in headcount was made up for tenfold by the fact that they were actually listening; laughing at the funny lines, happy-sad smiling at the ones they related to the most. That attitude marked the undeniable bud of a future cult following, one whose most major convocation to date was on February 7th, at Baby’s All Right. The difference between that first show I attended and their most recent isn’t simply a difference of scale, though. It’s one of recognition: Um, Jennifer? is becoming a band whose contradictions don’t cancel each other out, but instead organize a community of queer punks who recognize themselves in that tension. 

The first thing I noticed when I got past the person working the door at Baby’s was the sheer red lace adorned by New York’s “Americo-Liberian it-girl”: drag sensation Cherry Jaymes. She was gently backlit by a wall of wilting and blooming LEDs behind the bandstand; fleshy reds, sultry yellows, abyssal purples. In heels, she was so towering that her wig, a blonde 60s number, nearly grazed the ceiling. At that moment, I realized that I encountered Cherry once before nearly seven years ago, but the context of that meeting never resurfaced. What I did remember vividly was that in my eyes, she was pedestaled in a shroud of terrifying awe; I wanted to be her. And there she was, lip-syncing so effortlessly that I was convinced it was her performing every voice in “Love Shack” in real time, the male and female voices all collapsing together in the choruses. 

“I sort of learned in the past year or two that people aren't, like, doing us a favor,” Eli told me earnestly. “It's not just like our friends being like, ‘We're so proud of you!’” Um, Jennifer? took the stage and immediately jumped into “Girl Class,” an unapologetic anthem that acknowledges the complications of gender identity and eventually dismisses that notion completely with one simple instruction, one affirmation, and one piss-off exclaimation to anyone who might challenge its candor: “Say you’re a girl, you are a girl, fuck you.” The band extended the track’s introduction, a faux-phone call from Fig directed to someone who’s “really good at being a girl”—with her eyes darting all around the room, she said, “It’s really crazy to look out there and see people I don’t know.” She looked nonplussed, as if she was realizing in real time that the crowd wasn’t only composed of peers and old friends doing them a solid by buying a ticket. 

After “Girl Class,” they peeled off into the rest of the set, nervously at first. The sheer size of the crowd itself seemed to get the better of them only briefly; by “Daddy’s Girl,” they were well on their way to comfort. It’s a track that turns on a dime lyrically—a seemingly innocuous story about someone whose father was a “big producer man” that suddenly whiplashes the listener with gut-punching lines like “yeah, he fucked me up, but he didn’t do anything wrong”—and it’s a prime example of Eli’s standard writing process. He often envisions general characters and situations, he said, “And then I sort of take that chance to fill in the blanks with my own associations and my own life.” 

Fig, on the other hand, often lets the subconscious take the reins: “Usually the first lines that I write for the song will inform what it's gonna be, and sometimes that comes out of me with kind of a mushy mouth. I’ll listen back and hear what the vowels sound like, then I'll just write from there. It tends to come out as something lucid.” Such is the case for a song like “Keep It Tight” and its off-kilter stream-of-consciousness declarations: I’ll fuck your boyfriend; I’ll fuck your dad; and, to paraphrase, “That’s not a dick, it’s a knife in my pocket.”

By “Keep It Tight,” Eli had his shirt off and was dancing so frenetically that his movements resembled something like a sped-up stop-motion animation. He jumped onto drummer Grayson Ellis’s kick drum at a certain point and lingered there for what seemed like an eternity, trading celebratory glances with bassist Jada Lucye; he knew what he and the band were accomplishing and wasn’t afraid to give himself permission to be triumphant. During “Went On T,” Eli invited the audience into that moment of celebration with him. In lieu of “it’s been six months [on T],” the line was replaced with intense emphasis and an updated timeline to a screaming wall of affirmation: “It’s been three years.”

With the recent release of two rock-solid singles produced by Teddy O’Mara (Aggie Miller, Sir Chloe, Two-Man Giant Squid), Um, Jennifer? is entering what they call their Dirty Twice era. “Which is to say,” Fig told me, “that if you're dirty once, people will think that it's an accident. And so you have to be dirty twice to really kind of lock that in.” I asked if we could pull on that thread a little more, and was met with a joking response: “No further questions.” 

Eli chimed in to elucidate, regarding the story behind the phrase “dirty twice” and how it came about from initial reluctance to repeat the former word in a potential couplet (“dirty boots” and “dirty truth”): “Like, I don't mean nasty. I don't mean dusty, I don't mean something else, but it’s a sort of ‘writing rule’ to not rhyme the same words twice [...] It's a whole thing of, ‘know the rules before you break them’. And do I know my own writing? Do I trust myself enough to do this? Have I worked hard enough to earn this permission? And it's like, yeah—you can really just do whatever you want.” 

The show at Baby’s wasn’t a “homecoming” or a reinvention of the band, but rather a celebratory affirmative statement for Um, Jennifer? and a send-off to wherever they’re going next: when it comes to confidence and contrariety, they meant it the first time—they just had to be dirty twice to prove it. 

Listen to Um, Jennifer?'s newest single, “Comedy 42”